Low-carbon economic operation strategy for a multi-microgrid system considering internal carbon pricing and emission monitoring

With gradual deepening of a low-carbon transition of energy, the application of the multi-microgrid system (MMS) is becoming more and more popular. The internal carbon pricing mechanism is a key issue in realizing low carbon of the MMS. In order to fully utilize the advantages of energy mutual benefit and collaborative optimization, a real-time carbon trading model with cost minimization is established in the day-ahead market, in which the shadow price is taken as the optimal internal carbon price and the proposed distributed algorithm protects microgrids’ privacy. Furthermore, for the purpose of amending the deviation of carbon emission between the actual and target values, we design an automated process control (APC) strategy to adjust the real-time carbon price. And then a dual-objective problem is portrayed that balances cost and carbon emission deviation minimization in the intra-day market, and it is transformed into a single-objective constrained problem to be solved. Total cost and carbon emission decrease by 4.03% and 6.17% respectively in the solution. The results show that the proposed models have great performance of cost savings and carbon reduction for the MMS.